lyttel town: putting the "community" into the garden

always blessed with a stunning view whatever the weather.

Our community garden has been a source of inspiration, connection, and purpose for me.

We meet together every Wednesday for some digging in the dirt and then we share a meal together. These days it has been more of sharing the meal than the actual gardening and I am just fine with that – for now.

salad greens from the garden - thank goodness for the chickweed right now.

What we share is so treasured that it is the one day that I work my entire schedule around to make sure that I can be there. We share food, stories, lives, hopes, dreams and disappointments and all in the most incredibly open and supporting manner and we focus on ‘possiblity’ instead of things that are not right – that in and of itself makes a huge difference in the tone of our group.
We don’t complain or talk badly of people and new people who come into the group understand that pretty much right away.
We don’t tell them that; they just get it from how things are.
We think of ourselves as ‘chosen’ whanau – not the families we were born into but rather the one we have chosen to be part of as that just feels right.

a range of ages mixing and sharing stories.

We have a core group who have been coming for the last three years – Jacinda and her daughters Ruby and Sky and I all started coming just about the same time.
That was just over 3 years ago.
Jacinda is a great gardener and so she guides us in many things.
She also inspires me to come with an open heart.

knowledge passed down to the children.

I greatly value my relationship with her. For a bit of time she was the coordinator (completely unpaid) for our collection of gardeners but when she moved across the bay, she gave up this role. We discussed a few ideas about someone else taking that role on, but I talked everybody into trying a really flat approach of having no appointed coordinator at all. I really love the way in which we each take up the leadership mantle when we feel strongly about something.
We have tried it this way for a year or so and we find it works pretty well.

chickens integrated into the garden system, scratching up, fertilising and giving us eggs.

I know that we miss things and truthfully our seed sowing this year has been horrible but I also know that when we get our heads back into this, we will be off again. We thought that this Wednesday we should actually focus on either getting seeds sown or planning for the spring sowing – it turns out that we have all pretty much forgotten about sowing.

welcoming all who arrive and pleased to have wee ones in the garden with us.

Today is garden day and I am looking forward to being together. A few of us have been away and so today gives us an opportunity to catch our breaths, breath in together and enjoy being together – silently or noisily however that works out.

We might garden a lot and we might not and for me, that is all ok.